Waking Upward From the Nap Dress

How the proudly personally privileged Nell Diamond convinced so many women to clothing pajamas in public.

Photo: Jeff Bark

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York's reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up hither to get information technology nightly.

Information technology is barely 8:30 on a brisk winter morning, the city nonetheless on the groggy rise, only Nell Diamond, who is building an empire on the want never to leave bed, is unmistakably up. Peppy and personable in a red tartan Prada puffer, she had asked that I meet her hither, at a Tuscan-themed café near her townhouse in the West Village, earlier she deposited Henry, the 5-year-old at her side, at his nearby school and and so off nosotros'd march to her function. She's smiling and unharried, effortlessly embodying the agile dream of the entrepreneurial Manhattan mom in perfect control of the morning school-work shuffle. She collects her cappuccino and slips a hand to Henry, who tells me that he has already been fed and watered: "Eggs and prunes and orange juice."

Diamond is the founder and CEO of Loma House Home, the direct-to-consumer brand she launched in 2016 to offering nesting millennials cozily traditionalist linens their Wasp grandmothers might recognize (damask in flowers, embroidered with their monograms). She named it after the Nantucket family embankment business firm where she spent her summers growing upwardly.

But Loma House'southward recent runaway success turned out to be built not on dressing the bed but on the sleeper. In the bound of 2019, Colina House introduced the "Nap Apparel," a $125 cotton pinafore, practical, relatively affordable, somehow both a little modest and a niggling sexy. When COVID arrived, the fact that it was simple and comfortable enough to sleep in and put-together enough to Zoom in turned it into a sensation. It was well matched for newly shut-in lives. With a forgivingly stretchy smocked bodice and not a single push button, zipper, snap, or fastening, it pulls on similar sweats with just a skosh less schlump, and with its cottagecore way, it gives even a studio apartment an escapist whiff of a country habitation. At a time of near no fashion — we didn't have anywhere to go, later on all — the Nap became, for many young women who follow the trends, all that was left. In 2020, almost habiliment companies flatlined, but Hill Firm took off like a rocket. Status bedsheets were a sleepy business concern. Thank you largely to Nap Dresses, dress now accounts for 90 percent of the visitor's sales.

These days, the Nap Dress is ubiquitous, and to walk through the metropolis's diverse young-professional person brownstone districts is to encounter sleepwalkers on parade. Information technology's available in iterations of bodice, length, and sleeve. Once your eyes adjust to the Nap, you showtime seeing it everywhere. "Last summer, before I left for the Hamptons, I would take a 5-block walk from my apartment to where I selection upwardly my lunch and would lose count of how many people from the ages of 25 to 60 were wearing these Nap Dresses," one xxx-something who lives on the Upper Due east Side told me. These are the members of what they hashtag #NapDressNation, who eagerly anticipate the quarterly Nap drops, who own the dress in multiples, and who leave comments on Loma House'southward website headlined "I'm Addicted," "Addictive," and "Warning: May Cause Addiction." Celebrities (Emmy Rossum, Princess Eugenie, Mindy Kaling) mail photos of themselves wearing theirs. My sister, I found out final autumn, owns 5 of them.

Strolling down the artery, cheerfully bantering with Henry about his kindergarten-application interviews, Diamond is the Nap Dress girl herself, or what many of them aspire to be. She is striking, with a middle-shaped face, bone-china peel, high cheekbones, and red-brown hair that extends to her center back, a calling card of sorts — she has been obsessed with long-haired women at least since Princeton, where she wrote her thesis on the "wanton ringlets" of Milton'south Eve and her Pre-Raphaelite inheritors (and today, she does spon-con for Garnier Fructis, the drugstore shampoo). She is too a star on social media, where she is much the same equally I observe her in person: disarmingly sweet, not obnoxious nearly her advantages, but not apologetic either.

She is inescapably rich. Her begetter, Bob, was head of Barclays' investment-banking division, then its primary executive, and in an earlier era, she might accept settled into a social-circuit life of high-stakes PTA meetings and gala fund-raisers, the kind she spent her early 20s attending. Instead, she has go an entrepreneur-influencer on social media, marketing herself past marketing the company, and vice versa. On her own @nelliediamond account, she spent lockdown working from a bay window in her $v.8 million brownstone following the nascency of her now-one-yr-old twins, Willow and Sebastian, but has since added skiing in Courchevel and jubilant her anniversary with her hubby (a handsome marathoner who works in individual equity) at Tennessee's five-star Blackberry Farm resort to the mix, all with a candor and brute-force cheerfulness more surprising for coinciding with a moment when a song portion of the tweeting public'due south tolerance of poshness and privilege is at a snarling low.

Nosotros've arrived at the school, and Henry skips off with barely a backward glance. "Henry, I love you!" Diamond calls after him. Another driblet-off female parent, with expensive-looking highlights, stops her. "Information technology looked like information technology was amazing yesterday!" she says. "Was information technology and then great?" The twenty-four hour period before, Loma House had opened a popular-up shop on Mercer Street. Diamond is warm, polite, and betrays admittedly no indication that she has any idea who this woman is. "Oh, information technology was the best," she says. "So happy," the woman says. "Dear your stuff."

Diamond, by her ain access, was always a girlie girl. She was born in London in 1988, the middle child and merely daughter of Bob and Jennifer Diamond. Her begetter is a meritocratic success story, ane of nine children born to an Irish Catholic family exterior Boston (his dad was a public-schoolhouse teacher, then a principal). Equally he ascended the food concatenation, beginning at Morgan Stanley, then Credit Suisse, and then Barclays, he moved his family around the globe. Jennifer gave up her own career in production engineering to raise their children and brand a habitation out of any corporate apartment they wound up in. "Moving so much, my sleeping accommodation was like my little sanctuary," Diamond says now. "And I actually valued waking up in a space that felt like me," even if her female parent's way is "non as floral frontward, a lilliputian cleaner" than her ain.

Diamond had a taste for glitter from the earliest: In Tokyo, where the family moved when Nell was four, she never took off the sparkly heels that came with her My Size Barbie, and when the family unit returned to London in 1997, she experienced retail rapture among the purple eye shadows at the 1000.A.C store on King's Road. Equally she remembers it, her girlie-ness was discouraged. "You are the reason that feminists are never going to succeed," an Outward Bound instructor told her at 8 when she was afraid to rappel down the side of a mount.

Fiddling Nell loved to shop and haunted the city's megaretailers: the Topshop in Oxford Circus and the Gap in Chelsea, where she demanded her mother remain repose while she communed. Although Hill House today channels a sure mythic, countrified Englishness, as a child abroad, Nell longed for Eye America. When Abercrombie & Fitch opened its first location in London, she was hired equally store staff later the brand sent scouts to the American School to detect workers with accurate accents. (She never Anglicized.) "I was obsessed," she says. "I had never lived in America. It was iconic." She loved the spectacle of retail. "I tin can come across how what I was doing so — which, past the fashion, I felt guilty about and idea was not something that a smart, educated woman would do — was research," she says.

Diamond studied English language literature at Princeton, where she was conspicuous on campus for her way, wearing heels to course while the norm was sneakers and sweats. "I remember her but because she was the daughter with amazing outfits," a student who overlapped with her told me. Subsequently, she took a job at Deutsche Bank in New York. "There'southward a huge part of me that has e'er been trying to fight against this perception of me every bit this, like, super-silly lilliputian daughter who wears all the bows and frilly things and blueish eyeliner," she says. "And it was very important to me that I could get that job, and all the quantitative stuff, and pass all the regulated exams. Nobody can tell me the regulator knows who my dad is, that I passed that because of who my dad is."

But she institute herself constricted by banking's de facto dress lawmaking: no bows, no blue eyeliner, no platform heels with her Ann Taylor suits. The night before her first solar day, she cried for hours, an Elle Woods of Wall Street facing down a dismal future of banal banker-wardrobe rectitude. "It hurt. It physically hurt," she says with wide-eyed sincerity. "No criminal offence to Ann Taylor. Information technology was actually difficult, and I also felt guilty for it being so hard. Similar, it doesn't matter. Merely it does. If I can't experience like myself, I can't do annihilation."

She endured ii years. It was a tumultuous period in her family'south life likewise as her ain: In 2012, a scandal engulfed her father and ultimately cost him his position. Banks including Barclays, regulators discovered, had been manipulating an interest-rate benchmark called the LIBOR (London interbank offered rate) to goose profits. (Ultimately, Barclays agreed to pay a settlement of over $450 million.) Confidence in bankers' ethics was already at a low following the crash of 2008–9, and her father — an American in an English establishment — became, effectively, the face of banking greed. Politicians piled on, led by Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, and Bob resigned. George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, called it "the first step toward a new culture of responsibility in British banking," and Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party, while acknowledging that the problem was non limited to one person, said it "was clear Bob Diamond was non the man to atomic number 82 the change that Barclays needed." Diamond, then 23, dedicated her dad on Twitter. "George Osborne and Ed Miliband," she tweeted on July 3, 2012, "you can get ahead and #HMD" ("hold my dick").

Diamond wasn't famous, but she wasn't exactly anonymous. As a junior socialite, she was already a regular on the $1,000-a-plate social excursion — there she was at the Soho Firm Super Basin political party to kick off Mode Week, the New York City Ballet's Dance With the Dancers benefit, the NYPL's Library Lions gala, and the UNICEF Snowflake Ball — and the flare-up fabricated her briefly infamous: the tantrum-ing heiress. (Equally Bob Diamond told The New York Times Magazine, she called him and said, " 'Dad, I call up I did something really bad. I think I'k in problem.' " To which he said, "Sweetie, I dear you. That's and so nice. I call back we're probably all in trouble.") Diamond deleted the tweet and replaced it with a more diplomatic ane ("Shame to see the mistakes of few tarnish the hard work of so many"), merely the damage was done. The British press excoriated her, and the New York Daily Newsouth seized on her "24-karat life" and "gilded lifestyle — fifty-fifty if she has a tarnished begetter."

She might have gone effectively surreptitious, locking her social-media accounts and fugitive the public eye. Instead, she diameter upwards, newly confirmed in what was important to her (her family) and what was not (the sneering vox populi). "The No. i most important thing to me in my life is my family," she says. "Appearances are non more than important to me than protecting people who I love and I know." Condign, however briefly, an international object of scorn is a high cost to pay for an impolitic tweet, but it also inoculated her. "The experience of hearing people say the worst thing they could ever perchance say about you is in many ways a freeing experience. I tin can only be who I am," she says. "Considering people, you know, they're gonna retrieve what they think no matter what." (Bob Diamond has since founded the individual-equity firm Atlas Merchant Capital also as Atlas Mara, which invests in sub-Saharan Africa.)

Merely two years after her father's very public ouster, she married Teddy Wasserman, a financier ten years her senior whom she'd met at a mutual friend's birthday party in New York. It was neither a repose nor a private thing, and an Everybride she was not. A multiday bash at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc — located in Antibes and famous as both the setting for Tender Is the Dark and the inn of choice for the Cannes Film Festival — featured multiple gowns. The Daily Mail service estimated every dollar spent and noted that the effect was orchestrated by the same planner who did Prince William and Kate Middleton's hymeneals.

Photos circulated far and wide (the hymeneals hashtag #nellandteddy was eagerly picked over), and many of the reactions were hostile. "I'm sorry, only no. This daughter's dad is ane of those criminal bankers who has helped destroy the global economy. I can't actually have whatsoever enjoyment out of seeing her extravagant wedding photos," wrote a commenter on the beauty weblog Into the Gloss, where Diamond shared her hair-and-makeup prep. Others proclaimed their disappointment in the site; one frankly wrote, "Always practiced to promote the weddings of such down to earth criminals."

Past the time she was married, Diamond had left her cyberbanking task and was a student at Yale's School of Management. She'd applied with the idea for Colina House Home already in mind. "I wanted to create a brand that made people feel something — the way I felt something nigh Topshop, almost Gap and Abercrombie," she says. The original pitch for Colina House Dwelling described a bedding line nicer than anything at Bed Bath & Beyond but non as expensive as Frette, marketed in a younger, sexier, more direct way. It was the heyday of disrupters out to upend the brick-and-mortar dinosaurs: Brooklinen and Parachute both launched in 2014. But while those brands favored a more minimal aesthetic — marketing their wares, implicitly or not, as the natural companions to replica mid-century modern — Loma House was full-frontal floral.

"The chamber is such an of import infinite," Diamond says. "Even in my dorm room in college, I was like, If I don't put upwardly my weird pink feather boas and make it all pretty, my day is non gonna be great. I wanted to assistance people really take charge of those daily things and make them better and more than beautiful and more fun." Jennifer McFadden, associate manager of Yale's entrepreneurial programs, saw from the showtime that the bed would just be a jumping-off betoken. "I think she really intuitively understood that she was going to build an empire from day one and singularly prepare frontwards to do that," McFadden told me. "She is just probably one of the most natural, talented marketers I've ever met." (Diamond now sits on the School of Management's entrepreneurship advisory board.)

The company launched in 2016 with a dinner at the Standard hotel attended by the immature socialites of Diamond's friend group and a sizable contingent of Vogue girls, Bee Carrozzini — née Shaffer, Anna Wintour's daughter — amidst them. The following year, Vogue returned to Diamond, including her as one of the new "young roses" of philanthropy and club, and in 2018, she was among the eight women and one man of Shaffer'due south Tulum bachelorette party.

Over and over, Diamond has declined to be shamed into discretion with a doggedness seemingly born of optimism, stubbornness, and spine. Information technology's just not in her. She felt information technology was important to tell me the story from her adolescence about when a grouping of girls in London grammar school tricked her into eating a slice of pizza they then told her they'd pissed on. In her telling, they all eventually became friends; she won them over by brazening her way through. I found that equanimity surprising, but Diamond shrugged. "People accept potent reactions to me. That'due south always been the case," she says. "It'south something I talk about in therapy all the time — but I can't command other people'due south reactions to me; I can only call up about how I deed and bear and what my values are." Although, she admits, "patently, it still gets to me when people DM me mean things or whatever." Furthermore, she adds, "anything mean anyone's ever thought nearly me, I've thought about myself."

But if Diamond'southward diamond lifestyle alienates some, it seems to draw in customers. "This is really embarrassing to admit, simply I have been following Nell Diamond on Instagram because I saw her nuptials in Faddy several years before," Analeigh Smith, 35, a school development director in Maryland and Loma House fan, told me. "The hymeneals was so over the peak — I was so curious about her life." She now owns five Nap Dresses.

"It doesn't surprise me that at that place is a nation of women who are interested in what Nell does and wears, because I've seen people take that interest in her since she was eighteen, one style or another," her Princeton classmate Mark Guiducci, the creative editorial director of Vogue, for which he covered her nuptials, said. "When anyone is distinctly themselves, that can be divisive. They're a flavor — it's not bland." But, he added, "she was always in on the joke anyhow. That's the affair well-nigh her: She gets it, and she'due south totally okay with information technology."

Nell Diamond with her parents, Jennifer and Bob Diamond, in 2013 at the Conservatory Brawl. Diamond skiing in a Nap Dress in Courchevel, Rhône-Alpes, France. Photo: Sylvain Gaboury/© Patrick McMullan (family); Courtesy of bailiwick (skiing).

Nell Diamond with her parents, Jennifer and Bob Diamond, in 2013 at the Conservatory Ball. Diamond skiing in a Nap Wearing apparel in Courchevel, Rhône-Alpes, F... Nell Diamond with her parents, Jennifer and Bob Diamond, in 2013 at the Conservatory Ball. Diamond skiing in a Nap Apparel in Courchevel, Rhône-Alpes, French republic. Photograph: Sylvain Gaboury/© Patrick McMullan (family); Courtesy of bailiwick (skiing).

The office that the Nap Dress built is an adorably Instagrammable suite on the 15th floor of a Soho building. Hill Firm's previous habitation was a co-working infinite Diamond shared with 8 or so other brands; with only 5 employees, it didn't need much more. When decorating her visitor digs, Diamond indulged her inner tween, who never seemed that far from the surface anyway. Her own office — her first — is papered in Hill House's Trellis print, a chintzy pinkish-and-green floral that was part of Hill House'due south "English Garden" collection in February 2021. (Nap Dresses in Trellis have long since sold out, just interested parties can still buy the print as a tablecloth, a pillow sham, sheets, or a duvet cover on the website.) The entryway, with a vanity and mirror and a tassel-curtained closet, is covered every inch in Blueish Botanical, a soft, watercolor-like vine-and-flower impress in Delft blue. The overall outcome is pretty and disorienting, like walking into a dollhouse — or an enormous Nap. ("My thirteen-year-quondam cocky would admittedly dice to know I work here," she posted on IG.)

At the Colina Firm office, the Nap Dress is, unsurprisingly, de rigueur. At least i person was wearing it in every meeting I attended: a black 1 on Joslyn Allen Fecik, an alum of Calypso St. Barth and Roller Rabbit who was hired as the brand's first traditionally trained designer, who wore it over a turtleneck with white Converse; a plaid one on Sara Worth Mullally, who was hired out of college 5 years ago equally a customer-service rep and ascended to become Hill House's blueprint managing director; a light-green velvet one on Allison Greenwell Affinito, the chief product officer, who came last year from Hermès. At the factories where the dresses are made — mostly in China, though other Hill Firm product is in Italy, Portugal, and New York — "they're all hooked, they're all wearing it, they accept family members wearing information technology, and they're all on the Zooms, all wearing it," said Nesli Danisman, whose Angora Group worked with Hill House to source materials and prepare product. At design meetings, people refer to the dresses, many of which are named after people in Diamond'due south orbit — i is named Nesli, another Akilah, subsequently Dr. Akilah Buck, a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant who has worked with Loma House — every bit "she" and "her," as if in a multiplying sorority of flesh and material. "Everybody has their own spin on it," Diamond says of styling the Nap Apparel, though one employee I spoke with had a more pointed take: Later on a while, she said, "they all kind of look like her."

The Nap Dress was originally built-in to be a supporting player. Loma Business firm's early forays into fashion were tied to its sleep-centric mission. Early on on, the company offered pajamas in a more traditional menswear style, with a push-upwardly shirt and trousers. "People just weren't really responding to it," remembered Katherine Kapnick, Loma House's first employee. Diamond was sure there was an opportunity in sleepwear, but she didn't really want to wear the pajamas herself — she was, after all, a self-proclaimed dress girl who had staunchly refused to article of clothing pants as a kid. (Over several months, I never saw her in a pair.)

As Colina Firm bedding de-grannied the monogrammed sheets, and so would the Nap Clothes de-granny the nightgown. In 2018, Diamond began plotting out the perfect one, filling a vision lath with images from the 19th-century English painters Waterhouse and Millais, working off vintage nightgowns and tweaking them for condolement and practicality, and using herself every bit a fit model. (She volunteered "Pre-Raphaelite–core" to depict the expect, which is unlikely to catch on.) An email she sent that July, now framed on the wall of her office, memorializes her goal: "to try Nap Dress once and see how information technology goes. I think if executed well information technology's incredible!"

The first Nap went on auction in the spring of 2019 and chop-chop began outselling all of Hill House's previous hits. Aside from a few tweaks for functionality (before they were reinforced, the sleeves would eventually begin to droop), the design of one of the original Nap Dresses, the Ellie, a tea-length with frilled sleevelets (matching headband optional), hasn't changed.

"I don't remember we created anything revolutionary," Diamond tells me. But success in clothing is more almost making the perfect version of something people want rather than something all new they have to get used to. And it had the ideal name, which Diamond trademarked last year. (She never posts about it without its proud ®, as in her Instagram bio: "The Nap Wearing apparel® is my fourth kid.") In that location take been many nightgowns and nightgown-way dresses before — and certainly many, many others since, equally fast-manner retailers raced to knock off the Nap — but function of the dress's perfection is its succinct title. ("My Nap Dress Is a Big Old T-shirt," the Cut wrote, making the dress that classic of commerce: a solution in search of a problem.)

The Ellie is notwithstanding a best seller, but Diamond & Co. have iterated on it in a variety of means, riffing on past success. (It's not unheard of for staffers to layer 2 Naps to create a new await.) The Ellie has been joined by the Elizabeth (shorter), the Samantha (shorter still), the Jasmine (long-sleeved), the Ophelia (puff-sleeved), the Ana (a mini, bow-tied), and the Nesli (puff-sleeved and bow-tied). New fabrics, colors, and prints are constantly added, with "collector's editions" in tulle and lace priced at around $225.

I enquire Diamond about how much she was inspired by Laura Ashley's dresses, which were popular in the 1980s. But she disputes the connectedness — that vibe, she tells me, is "very literal, and I like everything we practice to accept a petty bit of irony." If so, it is an irony not unlike that of Bridgerton, which is to say a mild i. Like Hill Business firm, Bridgerton establish smash success channeling a frillier era under the guise of updating or reconsidering it, but with so loving an heart that reconsidering seemed hardly the betoken. In August, Hill House partnered with Netflix, Shonda Rhimes's Shondaland, and Meena Harris's Phenomenal to release iii Nap Dresses tied into Bridgerton, tapping illustrator Diane Hill to design a new floral impress (in ii colorways) for the collection. It was such a success that Loma House has continued working with Hill on upcoming drops.

Mindy Kaling.

Photographs by Fernando Ramales/BACKGRID, @hannahbronfman, @emmy, Beretta/Shutterstock, @cleowade, @ivygetty, @rachelbrosnahan, @mindykaling

Literature of the Nap Dress has cropped up to try to explain information technology, or to contextualize its concord on the pop imagination, or fifty-fifty but to wish information technology away. The New Yorker wrote about its "tranquillizing attraction," the promise of "a gauzy, cursory escape for those who tin can afford it." Elle was less sympathetic, declaring, "The Nap Dress must be stopped."

"I find these dresses to be really curious," Robin Givhan, the erstwhile fashion critic and current senior critic-at-large of the Washington Postal service, told me. "Information technology simply sort of seems like the verbal thing that would not be appropriate for this moment. If the same Nap Dress was something that had been churned out by Walmart, would people accept glommed on to it?" Reporting on Diamond, I found skeptics very set up to volunteer their disdain. "The Nantucket vibe is and then vile," ane friend told me. "Eat the rich, and she'south showtime."

There's something disconcertingly artless virtually the dresses, too, an aura underscored by the fact that Diamond at present offers them in infant sizes — a "Tiny Ellie" goes for $75. "My 2-twelvemonth-old girl was wearing the same one equally a adult female walking downward the street," said Meghan Cross, a partner at AmplifyHer Ventures, which invested in the company in 2019. "Talk nigh inclusive!" Diamond is known for her hair bows and headbands, which Hill House likewise at present makes and sells. "I am null," she posted well-nigh one such bow in 2020, "if not loyal to my 7-year-sometime self."

The pandemic was all nigh "cottagecore," an idyllic or avoidant retreat to land cutesiness, sourdough bread–making, and an allegedly simpler fourth dimension. It'southward tempting to run across Hill Firm as part of a larger moving ridge that includes Batsheva Hay's funky-frum prairie dresses, which come up in both discofied lamé and actual Laura Ashley prints and cost almost twice what the Nap Dress does, or Audrey Gelman'south new Six Bells store in Brooklyn, with its backstory legend of a fictional country hamlet and folksy paw-painted cow art.

But where does that go out the cottagecore community when the time comes to exit the cottage? The Nap Clothes's dominance is both a blessing and a burden: Information technology has fueled huge growth but as well a less diversified Hill Firm production mix. Tastes change and trends fade; what happens if the customer decides nap time is over? Web traffic to Colina House Home's site spiked hugely over the course of the pandemic, going from "nearly zero" in March 2020 to 744,505 monthly visitors in June 2021, said Jim Corridore, a senior insights director with Similarweb, which tracks online traffic. But traffic information around the 2021 holiday season indicated a significant falloff, "maybe showing the Nap Dress peaked in mid-2021," Corridore said. "People volition have like 12 of our dresses," Diamond says. "We don't need y'all to buy 13. What do y'all need to build that out and get in seasonal?"

Several collaborators told me they saw the Nap Dress equally the building cake of a lifestyle empire, some of whom had a financial involvement in this proving to be true; more than one reminded me that Ralph Lauren began his business selling but ties. Now the visitor is betting that a whole wardrobe might profitably be Napped. At a design coming together one forenoon, the Hill House team sabbatum around a table and discussed its forthcoming shoe collection, made in Italy, which would include flats and a platform heel in Hill House prints. "1 of the slides has to be actually extra!" Diamond declares. She fingers a prototype of an embroidered rose motif and considers: "It feels very Dazzler and the Beast to me." Swimwear launches this month, complete with Nap Wearing apparel–ish shoulder frills.

Diamond's investors are betting that her fans will follow her there, and anywhere. The appeal of Nell, and the appeal of the Nap, are not identical, but neither are they easily divorced. Much of Loma House's success comes from the community it has built direct with its customers online and on social media, and much of that work was washed directly by Diamond. It's working to try to augment both its attain and its bulletin and ensure that Hill Business firm represents a wide variety of its customers, bodily and potential, and that its models are an inclusive grouping of women of all skin tones and multiple sizes. (It's clear from visiting the offices that the staff is various, too.) But when the Colina House team was reviewing upcoming email and social-media promotion at a meeting I sat in on — one at which Diamond painstakingly rewrote most of the copy in her ain voice — information technology was Diamond herself they wanted to photo in a velvet Akilah Nap Dress for an upcoming e-mail boom, ideally in the colour they had the most stock of to push. "Nosotros really call up this is going to assistance boost sales: having an image of you in a holiday dress," said Worth Mullally, the design director. ("Does it have to be emerald?" Diamond asked. "I'm non allowed to wear any other one?")

Diamond comes to the office of social-media marketer naturally, or at least generationally; she was 22 the year Instagram launched. And while she no longer hand-types every caption on the @hillhouse business relationship — she officially gave up day-to-day direction of it two years ago, though Kapnick remembers trying in vain before she left Hill Firm in 2018 to persuade her to pass off the task much earlier — she oversees all of its content. I wondered whether she would exist posting as eagerly, as constantly, without a business to fluff. She thought so. Sitting in her office, she slipped a night-silvery ring off one of her fingers: Information technology was a sleep-and-activity-tracking smart device called Oura that measures heart rate and body temperature. "I've always said that I get very calm by scrolling through social," she says. "And this proved it."

When investors circle Loma House — as they take and continue to — it is Diamond herself (beloved her or hate her) who is the clandestine ingredient. "The main thing nosotros await for is the founder who has a unique power to create viral growth, and Nell admittedly demonstrates that," said Cross, the AmplifyHer investor who also brought in Peter Thiel'southward Founders Fund to invest in the visitor. "I tin can almost certainly say from my experience looking at 1,200 companies a year that Hill House Abode'south revenue growth far surpasses that of many of the fastest-growing direct-to-consumer brands." Because of Diamond'due south social-media acumen, the company's marketing spend remains low, less than v percentage of its acquirement final year; by contrast, i investor I spoke with estimated that 40 cents of every venture dollar invested in start-upward businesses goes direct to Google or Facebook for marketing.

Final month, Hill House airtight a Series B investment circular at a valuation of $150 million. In that location is much to exercise with that capital: more than hires (a first director of make marketing only came onboard, from Bumble), for one thing, and a permanent brick-and-mortar outpost in Manhattan, following on the success of a pop-up store over the wintertime holidays. That store had suggested that if y'all can draw new customers in to Hill Firm'south world, they will bring together Nap Dress Nation; according to Diamond, 1 out of every two people to walk through its doors bought something, and average social club values were higher in the store than online. So after Manhattan, who knows? The heartland appeal of Colina Business firm is obvious: Dallas is the No. 2 market after New York with Chicago behind.

Hill Business firm is Diamond'due south house and Diamond's fantasy, where the globe looks just like she wants it to. "I literally cried when I saw this stuff," Diamond said, pausing before a mirrored display of padded headbands when we visited that vacation pop-up. "This is what I dreamed of my whole life."

Waking Up From the Nap Dress